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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
City Council to consider surveillance at public sites
by Kathleen Haley, published on September 28, 2009 at 10:03PM
Storyline: Police/Public Safety
The Sacramento County chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union is raising concerns that the city’s plans to use surveillance cameras in public locations would intimidate participants in peaceful protests and create potential for racial profiling. On Tuesday, the City Council will decide whether to approve a $615,000 in federal grant that would be used to install security cameras and related equipment at various sites in the city.
The Sacramento County ACLU chapter has fought with the city for months over the planned purchase. City and police officials have said previously that the city plans to combat crime with a surveillance package consisting of 32 security cameras, four mobile surveillance trailers, and other related technology. The state was issued the money from the Department of Homeland Security.
Sites for the cameras have not yet been chosen. However, Mayor Kevin Johnson said in April that K Street and Regional Transit stations are the kinds of high-traffic and high-crime areas that might be furnished with the equipment.
Johnson supports the surveillance package, saying that it will help cut crime.
“I fought for the money and got it,” he said in a Monday press release. “Public safety is a top priority for my administration, and I will use every tool to help reduce crime in our city."
Jim Updegraff, chair of the Sacramento County ACLU chapter, told The Sacramento Press, that the City Council should delay the vote on the cameras because citizens do not yet have enough information about the proposed surveillance system.
The cameras represent an “intrusive invasion of privacy,” he said, and the city needs to do more to inform citizens of the ramifications of the surveillance system.
He also said Monday that the mobile surveillance trailers, if employed during demonstrations, might intimidate protesters. Updegraff further said the city has not explained if it will share its surveillance images -- including images of protesters -- with Homeland Security personnel.
In addition, Updegraff alleged that the cameras could be used as a form of racial profiling. For example, there is a possibility that police could respond to surveillance images of young African-American men standing around, he alleged.
The ACLU will make the public aware of the surveillance package, but does not plan to file a lawsuit over the issue, Updegraff said.
Meanwhile, Sacramento Police Department spokesman Norm Leong defends the surveillance package, saying that the department regularly uses surveillance footage taken by residents and businesses to solve crimes.
“It’s worked thus far,” he said.
Responding to Updegraff’s argument about surveillance at demonstrations, Leong said that police officers already monitor major demonstrations for public safety reasons. The mobile surveillance trailers will be used to provide a better view of the size of crowds and potential problems, he said.
Leong also disagreed with Updegraff’s suspicions about potential racial profiling. The cameras will primarily be used to produce footage that could be used as evidence, he said. The images would be used as evidence after a crime has been reported, he explained. Police would actively monitor a camera only in certain situations such as during a narcotics or decoy operation, Leong noted. He added that the cameras will not be used to target individuals and will not be monitored constantly by police officers.
Leong said he did not think the department has made a decision yet on sharing footage with other agencies.
The city's report on the surveillance package can be read here.
Kathleen Haley is a staff reporter for The Sacramento Press.
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Civil Rights, not so much.
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ps I love the fact that your picture of the sign is upside-down--a true statement on the priorities of this community.
Yes, it does.
In 10-20 years it won't make any difference whether it is corporations or the government that collects data about you. The data will be collected. Moving the info around will be a matter of paperwork.
Unless there are laws in place preventing the state and corporations from combining certain kinds of data, then corporate data and government data will form a cohesive whole. What's scary about that you ask? Long after the current leaders are gone, the cameras remain, but our laws are subject to change. The real question in this situations is: what would Karl Rove do? It's how the data is USED that really matters.
I, for one support the ACLU in this matter. I'm not against safety, I'm against unchecked power combined with limitless access to data.
The city already has a lousy track record with camera installations. I remember the cameras they put up over K Street, and how anybody was able to access them from the internet. Also, those cameras were utterly useless for collecting criminal conviction data due to lossy image quality and lack of autoadjustment features to compensate for lighting and climate conditions.
Several issues arise in using surveillance cameras for gathering crime data, and all of those issues involve spending lots of money. First is the issue of image quality in uncontrolled environments- cameras with that kind of resolution and reliability are very expensive, and that is still no guarantee that you will get a good enough image quality to be useful in court. Second, data retention becomes another issue, as all data collected is public records information and usually needs to be kept for, what, 20 years or more? Think about not just the disk space that will require, but also the expense of maintaining backups in a climate controlled storage facility, and migration of media when new storage and access methods become preferred (see data rot). Third, there is the matter of software which needs to have some automated features for this tool to be useful in any real sense. Applications like this are often heavily customized and require support contracts with the vendors which are also costly. Fourth, there is the training and retention of quality staff who are going to specialize in monitoring and responding to suspicious activity- they will have to be sworn officers (court cases regarding speed cameras already have set this precedent) which will be another expense that I don't think the city wants to pay for.
My biggest concern is that the City govt will cheap out on maintenance for this purchase, and then drop the issue once expenses start snowballing, but still have to maintain and make available all the data they have captured up to that point (which would be an endless money pit). However, if they are making an intelligent commitment to this, then I would like to see the budget estimates on per incident cost for retrieving data on a year by year basis over a period of 0 to 20 years from the date of the incident. If they don't have that, then they have no clue what they are doing.
I'd also like to know how they are going to keep this equipment from being stolen. I believe that SMUD put up a bunch of cameras and they ended up being stolen. The irony...
This study concluded that while the program decreased property crime within the view of the cameras by twenty percent, other forms of crime, including violent crime, one of the primary targets of the program, were not affected. It also specified the many costs associated with this camera program.